Opportunities for Collaboration between Occupational and Community Health: Stories from Two OSHA Inspections

Occupational Health and Community Health are important elements of Public Health and, not uncommonly, overlap. Yet, occupational health and community health practitioners infrequently work together. Obstacles to collaboration include bureaucratic protocols, poor communication, and lack of effective collaborative methods. Practitioners in these fields have much to learn from each other and can benefit greatly from collaboration. Two OSHA inspection cases that illustrate the overlap of occupational and community health issues will be presented. The first is a case cluster of Legionnaires' Disease with both occupational and community cases caused by a company's contaminated cooling tower. The second is an unusual poisoning of eight workers due to paranitroaniline exposure. The event led to activation of the county incident command, the temporary closing of two hospital emergency departments, and temporary elevation of the threat level by FEMA. Root causes and occupational safety and health lessons learned from these two cases will be discussed. Assessment of collaborative efforts will explore what worked and what did not. Approaches to achieving common goals and solutions will be explored.